Yeah, I watched the debates last night, both of them, and they weren't as much of a waster of time as I had feared. Certainly it wasn't possible to get an in-depth look at anybody since they all had so little time to speak. But it helps sorting all 17 of them out to just get an overview.

But maybe, if the goal here is to break men’s stranglehold on the currency, we shouldn’t start with someone whose appearance on the $10 will ensure that nearly every conversation about it begins this way: “Isn’t her husband much more deserving?” Because he is, you know. Like him or not.

For more than two decades now, the accepted wisdom has been that Ross Perot "cost" George H.W. Bush his 1992 re-election bid. But the reality is that he probably saved Bush from an ignominious and humiliating loss that would have rivaled FDR's 1932 drubbing of Herbert Hoover: